Dromi: Arab trouble is no surprise

Once again Americans are perplexed and frustrated by the blows they suffer from the Islamic and Arab world.

Watching the gruesome sights from Benghazi and Cairo, Americans may be thinking: Look how much we have done for them. We went to two wars to give them a free Iraq; our fighting men and women have sacrificed their lives to rid Afghanistan of terror; we have supported the Arab Spring and helped oust Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi.

Why do we deserve such a slap in the face in return?

Some of us, who are not just observers of the Middle East but who actually live here, were not so surprised. Especially those of us who have a long memory. Let’s borrow a page from the history book.

On Feb. 14, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia on board the USS Quincy, in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal. The American president, returning from the Yalta Summit, where the victorious allies had just decided how to rule the postwar world, met the Saudi king, hoping to achieve three goals: A Saudi consent to the settlement of Jews in Palestine; the establishment of American bases on Saudi soil; and a free flow of cheap oil.

On the first request, President Roosevelt received from his host a flat negative answer. Ibn Saud, however, had a very original solution for the Jews: Now that three millions of them have been murdered by the Nazis in Poland, he told his American guest, why don’t the rest of them go to the areas vacated by their dead brothers and sisters?

A fine suggestion, you have to admit. Says a lot about the Arab attitude in general, especially if we bear in mind that one of the most vocal Arab figures during the war was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who met Hitler in Berlin in Nov. 21, 1941.

The fuhrer promised his guest that when Nazi troops had conquered the Southern Caucasus, “Then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived. And you can rely on my word.” Unfortunately for the Mufti, he bet on the wrong horse.

Back to the Roosevelt-Ibn Saud meeting, which signaled a milestone in American involvement in the Middle East. After being rebuffed by the Saudi King on the Jewish issue, President Roosevelt nevertheless sent him a letter (one of his last) in which he reminisced on “the memorable conversation which we had not so long ago and in the course of which I had an opportunity to obtain so vivid an impression of Your Majesty’s sentiments on this question.”

He then went on to reassure Ibn Saud that, “I would take no action, in my capacity as Chief of the Executive Branch of this Government, which might prove hostile to the Arab people.”

While thinking about this American need to find grace in the eyes of Arabs and Muslims, I can’t resist the temptation to recall President Obama’s Cairo appeal to the Islamic world, on June 4th, 2009: “I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

Words which sound so hollow in light of this week’s events.

Let’s go back to 1945. Jewish settlement in Palestine aside, the American president did secure from Ibn Saud the two other requests, American bases and oil. Yet on his way back home, President Roosevelt gave a press conference on board the USS Quincy in which he made some interesting remarks on the state of Arabs in the Middle East:

“They’ve got no purchasing power to do anything with. Their only purchasing instrument is oil. Their people are not educated, do not get enough to eat, cannot cope with health problems... Now, of course, all that is tied up more or less with peace. A country that isn’t moving forward with civilization is always more of a potential war danger than a country that is making progress.”

So true, and so depressing. Because whenever Americans tried to help the Arabs move towards progress and modernity, they received results opposite to what they had expected.

“Liberating” Egypt and Libya from their dictators, without developing civil societies, fighting unemployment, poverty and illiteracy, is worthless. It only frees the most anti-American forces.

Yet even the in Arab countries which remain stable, under their dictators or monarchs, anti-Americanism exists. Almost seven decades after the historic Roosevelt-Ibn Saud meeting, al-Qaida terrorists hit America in the most horrible way.

Of the 19 9/11 terrorists, 15 were Saudi nationals.

The Middle East is more complex than meets the eye, and when Americans wonder what’s wrong, Israel should not always be picked as the first culprit.